Dec. 10, 2006

By Harry T. Cook

The victorious but fractious Democrats are poised to run Congress with their one-vote majority in the Senate and a barely comfortable margin in the House. They will ride back in to Washington, D.C., at the new year on the crest of a strong antiwar sentiment and try to remember what it was like to have power. It appears they will have sufficient power to forestall bad, and, if we’re lucky, barely enough to mother along some good legislation.

The infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters is already pounding out what seems like an infinite quantity of advice for the Democrats – mostly about how they can not only remain the party of power but make it last. Most of that advice, alas, counsels them not to be Democrats but purveyors of a themeless pudding that will not offend the civic taste buds of soccer moms, of Nascar dads and of all those Mr. and Mrs. In-Betweens.

I respect no public commentator as much as I do Thomas B. Edsall, occupant of the Pulitzer-Moore Chair at Columbia University, but I find myself dissenting from a piece of his advice that appeared recently on the New York Times op-ed page to the effect that the Democrats “must guard against the pull from the Left.” Edsall cites the party’s failure in the Doomsday Year of 1994 to pass a Bill Clinton measure that would have increased the number of felonies subject to the death penalty.

In lieu of that, the Democrats used their majority to increase dollars for programs that actually had a chance to keep youths off the street and out of trouble, making it less likely that they might come to occupy the electric chair for its one, brief shocking moment. Edsall points out with some asperity that, because one of those programs involved setting up leagues for midnight basketball, the blowhards of talk-radio went bananas and caused even so-called mainstream media to dis the Dems. That gave us, of course, the Gingrichian Congress and its Contract On America.

Well, OK. If the aim was to stay in power by not pissing off the Right, what was the point of having power in the first place? It wasn’t the Democrats’ aversion to capital punishment that was their problem, it was their pusillanimity in confronting it as a barbarism that brutalizes society. Hell, the Nazis practiced capital punishment. Are we Nazis?

The Democrats of 2007 have an opportunity to show the nation what their party stands for, at least in theory and by tradition. It stands for the little guy and the middle class and the apple-pie values of a decent wage for work that is not dehumanizing. It stands for adequate health care and universal health care insurance, a reasonable tax structure that requires those with much to pay taxes commensurate with their affluence and those with little not to be punished for having little.

Yes, being Democratic means being the friend of interest groups that have no standing apart from the necessity of their existence: labor unions, reproductive rights advocates and organizations dedicated to economic, social and racial justice.

Edsall decrees that the Democrats will be doomed to fail in 2008 and beyond if they do not abandon “a decades-long willingness to indulge pressure groups on the Left that no longer command broad popular allegiance.”

If, for the pledge of its allegiance, the broad populous demands the bloodlust of capital punishment, and a return to the day when society was clearly structured into the haves and the have-nots, to a time when Negroes “knew their place” and the Protestant God was saluted in morning prayers at P.S. 107, let the 2007 Democrats push back. They will be in a position to coax the allegiance of those in the political center to at least consider the values Democrats supposedly cherish. “Senator Reid & Speaker Pelosi: Don’t you dare squander this opportunity, or you will deserve to be dethroned in 2008.”

The going would be hard; that’s for sure. But let not the party of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Kerry or even Al Gore turn its back on the heritage of being Democratic in a time when the nation desperately needs surcease from the politics of the lying, thieving and just plain cruel Hard Right.

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ENDNOTE

As the Democrats make their transition into majority leadership in Congress and begin their exegesis of the Iran Study Group manuscript, they might want to think beyond the various proposals for staying, leaving, pulling back, negotiating, etc.

The larger questions the study group neither posed nor attempted to answer are:

1. What business did the U.S. have invading Iraq in the first place?

2. What did Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld think they were doing, and to what end?

3. Why did they mislead us about WMDs?

4. How could Congress have stood by so haplessly as Bush started the war?

5. How can such a catastrophe be avoided in the future?

Those are hugely important questions to which Congress and the American people need and deserve and substantive answers against the potentially fateful choices the latter will have to make in 2008.

 © Copyright 2006, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.